Mastering Your CD

Should you master your CD professionally or not?

The question still remains “What is Mastering?”

Beyond the quick answer in the opening sentence and short of a technical course study, a mastering engineer receives the final approved mixes from the artist/producer/engineer of a project. The task is to polish or finish the mixes so it will sound the best possible for the intended listeners.

Bob Ludwig of Gateway Mastering is by every account the top of the craft and has been for decades. It is worth your time browsing his credentials.

HOT, HOT, HOT

Everybody wants their disc to sound great, but it seems that nowadays a lot of people equate “best” with “loudest.” That puts a lot of pressure on mastering engineers to compress their masters heavily so that they can achieve as hot a level as possible. According to Ludwig, however, this is anything but a healthy development.

“It’s a losing battle for musicality,” Ludwig laments. “To me, it’s a fact that highly compressed music is tiring to the ear and doesn’t make you want to listen to something over and over again.

Ludwig adds, “Use your ears. Try to get it as perfect in the mix as possible. Having said that, if someone feels that they need extra compression, use caution. Most recording compressors are great for mixing but don’t really make good mastering compressors. Once you put compression into the mix, there is no way to take it off. If you aren’t sure, a much better plan is not to do much compression and let the mastering engineer take care of it.”

Ludwig stresses the importance of a mastering engineer having a musical perspective. “For me, it’s essential for an engineer to be a musician as well,” says Ludwig. “All of our engineers at Gateway Mastering and DVD play an instrument and have at least a four-year degree from a school that specializes in making music as well as recording and producing, such as the University of Massachusetts at Lowell or the Berklee College of Music in Boston.”

In addition to the right training and background, having the right workspace and the right gear is key, according to Ludwig. “The next most important thing is to have a fantastic monitoring system — as all your judgments will be based on this — having a great, acoustically perfect-as-possible room to put them in. For me, it means the room needs to be rather large in order to have as few bass eigentones as possible.” (Eigentones are acoustical resonances or standing waves in an enclosed space. They are caused by parallel surfaces, and they typically can muddy the sound or create bass frequencies in the room that are not in the recording.)

Ludwig sums it up this way: “Do no harm. For most of the recordings worked on, great mix engineers and producers have spent lots of time trying to get it right in the first place. I honor what they send me and try only to add any additional musicality my ears hear that can be enhanced in the mixes.” Words to live by.

Great music is mastered professionally in my opinion.

Bob Plotnik

Grace Recording Studio

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